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I'll look into a virtual machine and some script automation. The reason I do not want to use the main machine is because I want to store many different sof files on the host computer and have it decide which one to load for certain scenarios during run time without outside interaction. Much appreciated.
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Using a virtual machine would probably be the easiest path, in that you should be able to run a TCP/IP server inside the VM that your ARM Linux machine can communicate with, and have the VM download the various .SOF images. There are command-line tools that can load .SOF images, so a server based on Python or Tcl should be fairly simple to create.
You could also directly control the USB-Blaster from your ARM Linux machine using libusb and libftdi. Unfortunately Altera do not publish the information on what is required to download an .sof image via JTAG, so that would require significantly more effort (in reverse engineering) than just running a VM.
Note that one "wrinkle" with the VM under ARM Linux is that you'll need to find one that emulates an x86 so that Quartus thinks it is running natively. I'm not sure if VirtualBox does that, you might have to find a VM that emulates x86 well enough to boot x86 Linux, and then install Quartus in that. If that ends up being too painful, run USB-over-IP on the ARM Linux machine, and the .SOF server on some other x86 machine that also runs the USB-over-IP client. That x86 machine does not need to be your development machine.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
